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Monthly Archives: October 2004

It would seem that the Kitten’s Comment Pay extension I installed has put an end to the comment spam for now. The spammer in question didn’t choose to pay me to post his/her spam, rather he/she got frustrated that his/her posts were not showing up and all they got was a screen asking to send me money.

For the last 48 hours or so I have been fighting a spammer who keeps posting nonsense comments here on my blog. The point is to fill my blog with links to their site, which helps their serach engine rankings and spams their site to people happening to read my comments.

I used the built-in function of WordPress to mark their comments for moderation before being posted, however, they are hitting me about 20 times an hour, so this has been a pain to keep up with. Blocking their IP address from my site has been futile as well, for they use a different one each time.

So, I did some research and found a great plugin called Kitten’s Comment Paythat fights back. When someone submits a comment that is marked as potential spam, they are taken to a page where they can pay me $50 via Paypal to have it posted

The basketball season is less than a month away, and my preseason jitters are keeping me awake at night. You would think I am the starting point guard, but alas, I am not.

Here is the crazy thing:Athlon Magazine has Louisville (my favorite, in case you weren’t aware of it) ranked #1 in their preseason top 25. ESPN has Louisville ranked above Kentucky (13) and Duke (14) for the first time I can recall, at number 12.

I know what you are saying: preseason polls don’t mean a lot. However, based on previous polls since Rick Pitino has been coaching the Cards, Louisville has overachieved. Last year, they rose to #2 in the country atop a 16 game winning streak. Then they fell apart to injuries and being schooled in the inside game. This year, they actually have the post players to push back against the teams that took them apart. And according to Coach Pitino, they still have that same fire. So who knows what will happen?

With no one ever posting on the old Geekamongus forum, and new exploits of Invision Powerboard growing in number related to it’s increase in popularity, I decided to try something new.

I found this cool guy online who writes really cool little PHP scripts at MyLittleHomepage.net, and tried out the My Little Forum script. The author, Alex, is aware of Web Standards, and seems to have a clue about creating well-formed web pages. I mean, how many forums have you seen that are written in XHTML1.0 Strict? And RSS feeds?

Granted, the forum doesn’t pass HTML validation, but it’s only because of a lack of character encoding (the &’s are throwing it off). This may be something I can fix once I have time to do some reverse engineering.

It’s clean, lean, and easy to set up. Invision was convoluted, clunky, and not much fun to administer because of all the options that you don’t really need. Plus, I heard they started charging for the free version, or something that sounded like it wasn’t worth upgrading anymore.

Within about 36 hours, you will be able to see the latest round of Gray pictures. I am just waiting for the domain name to resolve to my new server. I went ahead an remade the whole site again in addition to posting pictures from the last 2 months, including our beach trip last weekend.

My daily check of molly.com revealed CSS guru Eric Meyer is near completion of a cool slideshow tool called S5. I had just started piecing together a Powerpoint presentation at work, and now I think I will ditch it for Eric’s semantic, valid method. It will make me the envy no one at work, but at least I will feel cool on the inside.

Along the same lines, I stumbled upon a nifty tool called Web Album Generator which makes quick work of cranking out standards-compliant photo galleries. I would like to have seen it abandon tables completely, but it’s not a bad tool for a quick and easy gallery for those times your parents in Kentucky are dying to see the latest picture of your kid

Speaking of Kentucky, I was recently solicited by one Thommy Browne to help fill in some history at the new LouisvilleHardcore.com wiki. Having a memory like an elephant, I hope to find time to write down everything I can.

The only news to report from here is that we had a great 4 day weekend at the beach. Gray was thrilled beyond belief at the marvels of sand, surf, and seagulls. Pictures coming soon.